The director said he remembers, as a child, looking at pictures from World War II, and being horrified by specific imagery. “I remember being very taken by the faces of the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit, you know? Ordinary Germans,” he said.

“I started wondering how it would be possible to stand by and watch that. Some of the faces actually enjoy it. The spectacle of it. The kinda circus of it,” he continued.

I thought our culture was done with zombies/zombie apocalypse as a means of coping with, uh, actual apocalypse, but it seems enough of a sell for Jarmusch to snag funding. I imagine it will be as much a zombie film as Only Lovers Left Alive was a vampire film.

Long ago, when our family was on vacation -- in a location with limited TV choices -- a broadcast of this "musical" came on. After listening/watching for about for about 5 minutes, all our children begged us to turn the TV off (they had no idea what it was -- and I had never proselytized against ALW).